It’s a chalk interpretation of “Steamnocchio” by Fabricio Moraes — his award-winning 3D CG steampunk adaptation of the Pinocchio story. Â Check out Fabricio’s other work, too — he does some great stuff!

One of the hallmarks of RMCAD art works is their use of reflectors to turn a curved artwork into something that is visually straight when seen from just the right angle. Â If you look carefully, you can see the bottom edge of their reflector in the top third of the above image.

In spite of fitful weather, we headed downtown yesterday for the 2012 Denver Chalk Art Festival. This was one of our favorites (reminds me of our kiddo’s response to a camera):

Normally the weather’s pretty cooperative by this time of year — it’s generally hot, but dry. This year, for some reason, we’ve had alternating hot & dry / cool & wet weather for the past few weeks. Saturday night, we got nailed by some fast-moving thunderstorms.

So most of the chalk artists lost Saturday’s work (in full or in part), and had to do major repairs on Sunday. Pretty impressive for a day’s work, I’d say…

This weekend I had a bit of time to myself — my wife and daughter were still in Arizona (I had to get home early for work), the weather was nice, and I’ve got no shortage of camera gear.

So when I could take a break from my honey-do list, I decided to make some quick trips into downtown Denver to check out the Denver Chalk Art Festival. It’s an annual, free, two-day street painting festival — with more than 200 artists turning 3 blocks of downtown streets into an open air chalk art museum.

And boy, are these folks ever good! Here you can see one hard at work on the details of her creation (BTW, there’s a contest associated with the festival — if you like the image and have a Facebook account, please leave a comment on its contest page):

I’m not sure if this one had an Avatar tie-in or not, but the skin tone’s about right (its contest page is here):

This next one was one of my favorites (it’s by Dawn Morrison Wagner, check out her web site!), even before it was finished: